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Calling In
Book

Calling In

How to Start Making Change with Those You’d Rather Cancel

Loretta J. Ross
Simon & Schuster, 2025
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Editorial Rating

10

getAbstract Rating

  • Applicable
  • Concrete Examples
  • Inspiring

Recommendation

In an era marked by moral outrage and public shaming, Black activist and educator Loretta J. Ross offers a radical alternative to cancel culture: “calling in” — that is, addressing harm with empathy, patience, and respect. Drawing on her lived experience and decades of activism, Ross illustrates how to confront injustice without creating fear, silencing dialogue, or fracturing relationships. By explaining how to hold people accountable without humiliating them, she offers a blueprint for building coalitions across divides that foster learning, growth, and real change.

Summary

Calling people out can create division, damage, and toxicity.

The practice of calling people out — publicly admonishing others for their mistakes and failures, whether intentional or inadvertent — has become all too common. Call-outs are pervasive online, but they occur face-to-face, too — in workplaces, classrooms, and elsewhere. Call-outs do have a place: A call-out is warranted when someone persistently declines to address a pattern of wrongdoing, when the damage is severe, and when other strategies have failed. Calling someone out is also appropriate when there’s a large power imbalance between the wrongdoer and the victim, when a call-out could stave off future harm, or when the call-out would spur other victims to come forward. For activists, call-outs can be an effective way of holding powerful people to account, and they offer an outlet for righteous rage.

However, cancel culture can turn momentary lapses of judgment, embarrassing mistakes, or decades-old social media faux pas into reputation-destroying events. The fear of being called out can lead people to withhold their opinions. Self-righteous, overconfident, and aggressive people who consider themselves...

About the Author

Human rights activist Loretta J. Ross is a co-founder of the National Center for Human Rights Education. She’s a public affairs consultant and an associate professor at Smith College.

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